His brow furrowed. “Fine,” he said. “Hard, I guess. I’m stuck on this one. I keep thinking I’m getting it right, but when I check in the book, it’s wrong.”

“Can I help you?”

“Sure,” he said.

When he slid his notebook toward me, I saw his hands—olive skin with graceful fingers, each of them straight except for the ring finger of his right hand. That finger turned out above the knuckle where it had clearly been broken and left to heal on its own. I became aware, then, of the way I moved through the world. No unusual scars or crooked bones. Nothing about the way I looked at first glance that gave me away. I wondered who had done that to him. Who had left it untreated.

He must have noticed me looking because he moved his hands under the table. And it struck me how bad it felt to him, to have me look for too long. My face burned. I wanted so much to be good at this.

I gathered my hair as I would if I were putting it into a ponytail.

“Look,” I said, showing him one of my earlobes and then the other. He leaned in, looked closely. I felt the intensity of his gaze, and felt, too, the weight of what I was showing him.

“Do you see how the holes aren’t centered? Do you see how this one . . . is higher than this one?”

Lee nodded.

“I didn’t get my ears pierced because I thought it would look pretty. I didn’t get it done at a mall or in a shop. The person who did it, he did it to hurt me.”

I had never spoken the words before, hadn’t told anybody. Now Lee would know it forever, and it would bond us together, and I hoped he would never again feel like a spectacle of pain around me.

We held each other’s gaze for so long that I knew it must have meant something. Finally, he nodded, brought his hands back to the table. I looked at the ruled paper, his painstaking numbers, the little blacked-in squares of wrongness.

“Okay,” I said. “Let me see. It’s been a long time since I’ve done this.”

I asked him to walk me through the problem, at first because I needed to remember the steps of long division but then because I realized it was a good method, to have him explain it to me. I caught his mistake a step before he got there, and then when he reached that point in the problem, he hesitated and I smiled.

“Oh,” he said. “It should be seven.”

“Yes. Now keep going. Let’s see what you get.”

“Seventeen-point-five,” he said. “I’m pretty sure . . .” He turned to the back of the book and showed me.

“You got it!”

“Yay!”

“Should we start the next one?”